1. Technical Field
Aspects of the invention relate to an image formation controlling method, a program product containing instructions to carry out the method, and an image printing apparatus employing the image formation controlling method.
2. Related Art
Owing to improvement of the image quality and lowering of prices of color printers, color text created/edited on personal computers can be printed easily.
Generally, a color reproduction range of a display (e.g., LCD or CRT) is greater than that of a printer. Therefore, when the color text is printed, part of the color may not be reproduced. In order to deal with this problem, a color matching process, or a compression of a color space is typically carried out.
Further, in order to display a color image on the CRT, the color space is expressed using an additive color mixing process of RGB data, while, for the printer, a subtractive color mixing process of CMYK data is generally used. Therefore, a plurality of colors are mixed, subtle differences may occur between the images displayed on the CRT or LCD and printed by the printer.
As above, it has been difficult to obtain printed color images as desired by the user since the printed images are not printed as displayed on the displaying device.
In order to avoid the above problem, an image formation method to control printing quality characteristic in a printer is known. An example of such a method is disclosed in Japanese Patent Provisional Publication No. 2001-292331 (hereinafter, referred to as '331 publication). According to this '331 publication, as color space matching process, an image processing application is configured to provide a plurality of processing modes to process images. The modes include a “hue priority mode”, wherein the lightest color and the darkest color in the image data are matched between the displayed image and the printed image, a “color difference minimizing mode”, wherein only a portion of image data that is out of a reproductive range is mapped outside the reproductive range of the image formed by a printer are mapped to the thresholds of the range, and a “vividness priority mode”, wherein the color space of part of the image data out of the reproductive range of the printer is compressed with maintaining possible color saturation. By selecting a necessary mode, a condition for color processing corresponding to the selected mode is set, and the image data is processed based on the thus selected condition.
Recently, the color printers are used for printing images on fabric such as T-shirts. When the image formation is made on the fabric (e.g., T-shirt), users tend to prefer “vigorous and sharp-contrasted” images, “clear and vivid” images, “unclouded and high-colored” images as images on the fabric to ordinary color images, which are printed on sheets of paper for office documents and the like and are required high fidelity.
In the '331 publication, control of reproductive quality of an image printed by the color printer in accordance with the difference of the reproductive ranges between the CRT (or LCD) and the printer so that the image data is reproduced in high fidelity. However, the above-described needs of the users when images are printed on fabrics cannot be fulfilled with the conventional printers such as one disclosed in '331 publication.